Realistic child robot “Affetto” for understanding the caregiver-child attachment relationship that guides the child development

Children are considered to develop various kinds of their social abilities in communication with their caregivers. Developmental researchers have revealed the quality of the caregiver-child attachment heavily affects the children´s developmental passway and sometimes threatens their healthy development. For understanding developmental mechanism under the caregiver-child attachment, a number of theoretical models have been proposed and some child robots have been created to test these models or to find new facts about development. However, most of these robots have not been provided with a realistic childlike appearance or facial expressions, which seem important to induce caregiver´s attachment. Since what kinds of treatment robots receive from the “caregivers” appears to depend on what kinds of impression the robots give to their caregivers, more realistic robot that is more close to a real child seems needed. In this paper, we introduce our project to build a new child robot, Affetto, that has realistic appearance of 1- to 2-year-old child, and discuss what kinds of issues on child development can be examined by using it.